History Told From
Below the Waterline
Narrative histories grounded in survivor testimony, inquiry records, and primary accounts. The Titanic story — told from the perspectives of the women, immigrants, and workers that history forgot.
The Books
Ladies First
Titanic's Reckoning with Wealth and Worth
The sinking of Titanic has been retold for more than a century, but rarely from the lens of the women onboard. Ladies First reveals how wealth, class, fear, motherhood, and duty shaped survival in the most famous maritime disaster in history.
This was never just a tragedy of ice and steel. It was a reckoning of wealth and worth. More than chandeliers and champagne, it's a story about inequality and the human cost beneath the legend.
Steerage and Steel
The True Stories of the Titanic's Immigrants and Crew
Third-class women were not passive background figures. They were immigrants, mothers and young women carrying everything they owned — and everything they hoped to become.
Grounded in passenger lists, crew rosters, inquiry records, and survivor testimony, this book follows the people whose labor powered the ship and whose lives bore the actual cost of collapse.
"Quietly devastating, deeply human, and incredibly important."
— Reedsy Discovery
FAULT LINES
The Fault Lines series examines moments when progress, confidence, and modern systems collide — and fail. These books focus not on spectacle or hindsight, but on the underlying fractures that disasters expose: labor rendered invisible, class shaping survival, technology trusted beyond its limits.
Fault Lines is not a history of accidents. It is a study of systems under stress, of warnings ignored, and of the human consequences that follow when risk is unevenly distributed.
Learn More About the SeriesAlina Rush
Alina Rush is a writer and storyteller whose work centers on the experiences of ordinary people caught inside extraordinary events. Her research draws on survivor testimony, inquiry records, passenger lists, and primary accounts to reconstruct the human dimensions of historical disasters.
The Fault Lines series — beginning with the Titanic trilogy — traces how economic, social, and technological fault lines run beneath seemingly stable worlds. Each volume grounds its narrative in verifiable history while centering the experiences of workers, immigrants, families, and communities.
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